The second annual Michigan Pinball Open saw 24 players battle it out across 4 divisions for the coveted prize of Michigan Open Grand Champion. The tournament saw players from neighbouring states as well as neighbouring countries for a day of pinball at Marvellous Marvin’s Mechanical Museum. After qualifying concluded, the field of 12 players in the A division was whittled down into 4. The semi finals were decided by match play in a best 2 out of 3, with Andy Rosa facing Mike Wiley and Trent Augenstein facing John Flitton. The finals came down to John Flitton and Mike Wiley in a best of 3 on Family guy. In the end, Michigan native Mike Wiley was victorious and took the Michigan Open Grand Champion Prize. So 2nd place was John Flitton, 3rd was Andy Rosa and 4th went to Trent Augenstein. The EM Division winners were (1) Trent Augenstein, (2) Andy Rosa, and (3) Josh Henderson.

The Tournaments at the 2009 Northwest Pinball and Gameroom Show were a huge success this year, with over 80 players participating including some of the top players from around the country. In the Open Division, the top 16 players were narrowed to 8, and then 4, the final rounds culminated with both Josh Sharpe and Eden Stamm playing a one-game-tiebreak on Twilight Zone for the Northwest Pinball title. In what was a very exciting finish, Eden was able to put up one of the highest scores of the weekend to secure the victory, and win the Open Division, becoming the show’s first Double Champion having also won the Classics Tournament earlier that day. Other OPEN finalists were Zach Sharpe (3rd) and Trent Augenstein (4th), while the other CLASSICS winners were Neil Shatz (2nd), Josh Sharpe (3rd) and Jeff Gagnon (4th).

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After the success of the first GameWorks Pinball Tournament of Champions last December in Chicago, GameWorks once again teamed up with the IFPA to host the 2nd event at the Chicago location. 38 players competed for 16 qualifying spots on Family Guy, Soprano’s, 24 and Stern’s latest NBA. The finals came down to Trent Augenstein and Zach Sharpe, which went all 3 games where Trent defeated Zach on NBA to capture the title. Dave Hegge took 3rd place, while Jason Werdrick took 4th place.

28 ladies showed up for the bi-annual event, and after several rounds and 26 gals eliminated, the final match was held on a Bally Night Rider between Bonnie Bedford (winners bracket) and Jamie Beth Einsohn. After Jamie Beth won the first game, it came to sudden death… this game would decide it! Both girls had eclipsed each others’ scores back and forth, and when the last ball had drained the final scores were: Bonnie – 48,310 . . . Jamie Beth 48,150! This was one of, if not THE closest match in all of Shorty’s finals history!

The IFPA is proud to announce it will be teaming up with GameWorks once again for the 2nd Chicago Pinball Tournament of Champions the weekend of May 22nd through May 24th at the Schaumburg location (Streets of Woodfield). Over $1300 in Cash and prizes, along with the first tournament to feature Stern’s latest, NBA. This is one of the over 100 tournaments throughout 2009 where players can earn world rankings points and a chance to compete in the IFPA 7 World Pinball Championship to be held in 2010. Email the IFPA at ifpapinball@gmail.com for more details.

The IFPA is proud to announce it will be teaming up with GameWorks once again for the 2nd Chicago Pinball Tournament of Champions the weekend of May 22nd through May 24th at the Schaumburg location (Streets of Woodfield). Over $1300 in Cash and prizes, along with the first tournament to feature Stern’s latest, NBA. This is one of the over 100 tournaments throughout 2009 where players can earn world rankings points and a chance to compete in the IFPA 7 World Pinball Championship to be held in 2010. Email the IFPA at ifpapinball@gmail.com for more details.

With the new rankings calculation now in effect, we’ve seen some changes in the World Pinball Player Rankings. This can be seen as high up as the top spot, where Sweden’s Jorian Engelbrektsson is now the player to catch for the World’s Greatest Pinball Player award for 2009. With a full calendar of events ahead of us, we’re excited to see how the season unfolds.

If you take a closer look to the right, you’ll see that the rankings have changed somewhat. The system itself has had a complete overhaul and there have been many rule changes in regards to what — and how — something is counted in the rankings. The site itself has had some tweaks done to make presenting the data easier and to help prepare for the full redesign of the site I have planned.

Going live with these rankings took longer than expected and for that, we apologize. The new system required testing various possibilities and we soon discovered some flaws that needed to be addressed.  Read on for a more detailed list of changes to the system.

For the new system, we wanted it to be based in mathematical formula and not just some prefixed set of points. The original system had all players bringing a ‘value of strength’ to a tournament they played in. We quickly discovered that this allowed large tournaments to overrun the rankings. Unfortunately this issue, plus many others required changes from our initial plans and the end result is sort of a hybrid of the old system with something that is actually calculated.
Changes to what is and is no longer counted:

• Leagues are now included in the rankings. They are treated as a annual event.
• Team based tournaments are no longer counted.
• Monthly tournaments are rolled up by the year they are played in and are worth the same as a normal annual tournament.

Summary of calculation changes:

• Each tournament is worth at least 25 points. PAPA, IFPA and EPC are at least worth 50.
• Each player is worth “x” amount of points based on the ranking when entering a tournament.
• Only the top 64 of each tournament are used to determine the strength of the tournament. This value is added to the base value.
• Points that are rewarded are much more distributed from top to bottom. 10th place at PAPA is now worth something.
• Except for PAPA, IFPA and EPC, events are capped at 50 points.

The end result is something we feel is fair to everyone and does more to separate those who play and those who only attend one or two events. We can go into more details later and if you have any questions, please send them to ifpapinball@gmail.com.

Yeah, we know Keith is not #1, but if you look at Jorian’s record — it’s pretty impressive too!

The third Balacs Pinball Party event was with 68 players, featuring most of the top Swedish players and 3 top players from the Netherlands. Everybody qualified 2 attempts on 6 different machines (Attack from mars, Dirty harry, Banzai run, Pinball magic, NBA fastbreak & Indiana jones).

24 people advanced to a single elimination cup, where each match was played best-out-of-three. Mats Runsten beat Karl Brostrom (winner from 07 & 08) in the final and Jorian Engelbrektsson beat Markus Hugosson for third place.

In the classic tournament Jonas Henriksson beat Martin Tiljander in the final and Richard Nauta beat Frans Bergbom for third place. Picture left to right, Markus Hugosson (4th), Mats Runsten (1st), Jorian Engelbrektsson (2nd).

Great job everyone!